The good news: You don't have to spend a dime on your first car. The bad news: Your selection is pretty weak. None of the cars offered at first could be considered fast, and some are among the most loathsome cars on the market. But two cars stand out above other others. Both the Ford Fiesta and the Honda Fit have some semblance of performance legitimacy, sporting eager handling characteristics and light weight. No, they're not fast in a straight line, but neither is your competition. Pick one of those two cars to start and you'll be headin' the right direction.

Don't Waste Money on Upgrades

As you start winning races, you may get eager to spend money on upgrades. Fight this urge. Your first car will become very useless very quickly, so it's not worth putting money into it. Early in the game, you earn so many free cars and move between such a variety of race events that money spent on upgrades is essentialy wasted. Save your cash, because eventually you will need to buy something.

Use Free Cars

Continuing the theme of fiscal conservatism, we advise you not spend money on new cars unless necessary. Through at least the first two race seasons, you can use the cars you earn from leveling up your driver to compete in more and more events. Do your best to pretend that you don't have any money to spend on new cars—the longer you ignore your bankroll, the bigger it'll get. You'll need the money eventually when events require new and better cars that you can't simply earn.

Pick Events Wisely

In order to get by in the game's career mode without spending money frivolously, you'll need to be careful about the events you choose to fill out your calendar. When you're tasked with filling out your calendar, view the specifics of each potential event. Note which events earn you the most money per race, and which require vehicles you don't already own. Even if you've got a car that's eligible, it may not be fit for competition. For example, we weren't paying attention and entered a high speed circuit event—while our car was competitive on tight courses with lots of turns, it maxed out at a low top speed and had no chance of winning.

Assists & Difficulty

When you first start the game, you're asked a vague question about how serious you want your racing experience. Your answer to the question dictates the various racing assists that are enabled for you by default, but you can make adjustments to these settings once you're on the main career mode menu (choose "Set Difficulty"). By disabling assists, you can boost the amount of money you earn from every race, which helps not only your bank account but also your driver level. Some of the assists are very helpful, but some are very expendable. Here's a quick breakdown of the lot.

autobrake

Uhh, turn it off. It's an easy +10% to your take home after a race and we find its use fairly dubious unless you are painfully new to the game.

Stability control isn't terribly useful, which is why you only get +5% to your payouts by disabling it. Unless you're having a lot of trouble keeping your car under control, we suggest leaving stability control disabled.

traction control

You'll find traction control very useful as you power out of corners with high-horsepower cars. But early in the game, as you're using low-powered vehicles, traction control isn't terribly necessary. As well, traction control on an AWD car is sort-of-kind-of redundant. We think the +10% to your pay is worth disabling traction control, though consider reenabling the assist when you get into a race that requires an unruly vehicle like a Corvette or other powerful, rear-drive ride.

shifting

This is a matter of preference. If you can manage a manual shift, it's certainly worth the +10% to your take home pay. But if you're not used to shifting your racing games, trying to learn manual shift during a career run will likely cost you way more money than it'll earn.

suggested line

The most important part of the suggested line is the braking bit, so we suggest instantly flipping the assist to "braking only" for a free +5% to your pay. When you're new to the game and don't know the tracks very well, the braking line will help prepare you for corners. But as you learn the tracks and commit them to memory, you can disable the braking line for the full +15% to your pay.

opponent difficulty

This setting depends completely on your skill. Experiment with higher difficulty settings to see how you stack up. If you're having trouble with a particular event, you can drop the difficulty to get through the challenge and then bump it back up so that future events earn you more pay.

damage, fuel, tire wear

Set to "limited," you won't feel much affect from damage, fuel and tire wear in any of the game's early events. Only once you get to long endurance events will you really start to feel the pains of accumulated damage and forced pit stops. As long as you've got a decent grasp of the game's physics, you can bump up the damage setting to "simulation" and benefit from the +15% pay while paying a bit more for repairs, but when it comes to longer events you should consider dropping the setting and taking a cut in cash.